I finished watching Keyboard Fantasies about Beverly Glenn-Copeland and I very much recommend. Born in 1944, Copeland grew up in a planned racially integrated Philadelphia community known as Greenbelt Knoll. His father was a pianist, and his mother sang spirituals. Copeland left at age 17 to study classical music at McGill University in Montreal. He was the only Black student in the program, and identified as a lesbian at a time when transgender identity was neither well understood nor accepted.

Worried for his safety, his parents tried to have him treated with electroconvulsive therapy. Instead, Copeland dropped out of school and started writing songs.

Paragraph 175 about the law that was created to rid Germany of homosexuals and which was used to justify the persecution of gays during the Holocaust. The law made sex acts between men illegal. It was a provision of the German Criminal Code from May 1871 to March 1994. 

Narrated by Rupert Everrett, this documentary includes the testimonies of 6 gay survivors of the Holocaust. They share bittersweet moments, love, and humor that they experienced while the horrors of the Holocaust were unfolding.

There are several places online you can rent this movie: youtube, itunes, google play, or vudu with pricing ranging from $3.99 - $4.99. But you can also find this movie for free on Kanopy. You can see the documentary without closed captioning or subtitles for the German interviews here.

Marilyn Robinson - Transgender Tuesdays -  a founding board member of the Transgender Law Center in San Francision. Ms. Robinson recounts going to the psychologist as a child in the 1960s because she wanted to be a little girl and the psychiatrist abusing her.

Warning: Child sexual assault. "You have to bear in mind that there was no name for how I felt in 1960. I was born in 58 so 1960 whatever and a child and a black family I knew I was different because of how people treated me and viewed me. Like other children you know I didn't have any friends growing up.

One day I saw my sister go to the bathroom and then it occurred to me I thought wait a minute, I don't have the same thing she had.

I had to go see a psychiatrist at that age. I told the psychiatrist that I want to be a woman, a girl, cuz you don't say woman at 8 years old or 9. You'd say I want be a girl and he would show me pictures of boys and he would often ask me always, "Is this what you like on boys or this what you like on boys or this would you like on boys?" Now mind you I never thought of sex and I'm having sex with a guy I just thought of being a girl you know, so he used that as a way to make me play with him you know my psychiatrist did, he wanted me to perform fellatio on him." Full documentary on youtube

Transscript memories of what it was like to be transgender as children in the 1950s and 1960s: Astrid Olsen: I was encouraged into outdoor sports I was yanked from school a lot to go to sporting event you like the Giants. I saw Willie Mays play he really was that good and they did everything they could to make a man out of me. And I was encouraged in this but it just didn't work.

Nola Vandella I guess by second or third grade it was a conscious secret y'know something kind of confusing and the night before I was supposed to get my Cub Scout uniform I had a dream that, I'll never forget we went to the store where you get Scout uniforms and they sold me a brownie uniform and nobody said anything and then I woke up and Wow by then it was like every single night and day and I couldn't talk to my parents about.

Nola VanDella

"When I was in kindergarten nine I started noticing I was regularly in my dreams a girl and in real life it was, it didn't quite match"

Full documentary on youtube

Transgender Tuesdays

This movie interviews 12 patients who were treated at the Tom Waddell, the first Public Health transgender clinic in the country, launched in 1993 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The documentary captures the stores of elder transgender people of their experiences from 1950s-1990s. Red Jordan Arobateau was a working class writer, author, painter, and biracial transman who was born in 1943 and grew up in Chicago. Arobateau was a patient at the Tom Waddell clinic. His interview focuses the lack of representation of LGBTQ, and specifically Transgender people in the media. Far from having encouraging messages or societal support, as a child he knew that he was a boy. The thumbnail clip shows a picture of Marilyn Robinson a transgender activist, but Red speaks immediately after her.

Full Documentary on youtube

Transcript of the clip - Red Jordan Arobateau:

"My earliest memory, I was a boy and I was doing all these boy things all the time, very early. And I might add this was the days before television. We're not getting bombarded by Rosie O'Donnell, and our wonderful, Oprah Winfrey, and all these TGTS, Gay, Bi, Lesbian programs. There was no television at all. So I had just manifested this all by myself.

we learned all these lies, like everybody else

"All of us millions of lesbians and gay men were once American children. And the first lie most of us were told about homosexuality is that It didn't have anything to do with anyone we knew. It certainly wasn't about anyone we loved or respected. It wasn't about Uncle Jim and that nice friend he lived with, or Great‐Aunt Sally, who'd been sharing an apartment with, her friend “Aunt Jennie” for the last 40 years. It certainly wasn't about any of our teachers." NYTimes, 1977, Anita Bryant's Crusade, Jean O'Leary and Bruce Voeller

Anti-gay activist Anita Bryant gave an interview to Playboy Magazine in 1978. The journalist, Ken Kelley was gay, but he wasn't out at the time. This is an excerpt from an interview Ken did while touring with Bryant as she spread her "Save Our Children" campaign in Florida. Save our Children was a response to overturn a county ordinance that banned discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation. You'll probably notice some similarities with today's conservatives around gender and transgender people. ANITA BRYANT: This whole discussion is so delicate—that’s why it’s so important that the government and the public schools should not take the responsibility to explain sex to our children—it is the province of the parents.

PLAYBOY: Some parents may be less qualified to explain it than educators are.

ANITA BRYANT: I don’t care, the child should hear it from the parents.

PLAYBOY: Many parents refuse to accept the responsibility. What then?

ANITA BRYANT: I know. It’s not easy. I don’t have all the answers. I know what you’re talking about, because my mother and her mother didn’t know how to talk about sex.

Seem familiar? This is exactly the argument people like Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok), Matt Walsh, and Chris Rufo are saying right now at transgender and gender non-conforming people. In response to the ad this headline came from, and the campaign to "Save Our Children" by Anita Bryant, gay activists in 1977 responded:

"Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children Inc. are doing the 20 million lesbians and gay men in America an enormous favor: They are focusing for the public the nature of the prejudice and discrimination we face.

Homosexuals, the Save Our Children folks said in a recent full‐page ad in The Miami Herald, used to be stoned to death. But nowadays, they said, there's developed “an attitude of tolerance ... based on the understanding that homosexuals will keep their deviant activity to themselves, will not flaunt their lifestyles, will not be allowed to preach their sexual standards to, or otherwise influence, impressionable young people.” Anita Bryant herself said it even more clearly on a recent network television show: “We're not going after their jobs, as long as they do their jobs and do not want to come out of the closet.”

What this means should be abundantly clear: Gay women and men in this country have been required to join a conspiracy to pretend we don't exist, so that other people can lie to children." -Read the Full Response in the NY Times in 1977 by Jean O'Leary and Bruce Voeller. Also available on archive.org.

Silent Film - 1919 - Kino Lorber's description, "One of the first gay-themed films in the history of cinema, Different From the Others was banned at the time of its release, later burned by the Nazis and was believed lost for more than forty years." From me: Germany enacted Paragraph 175 in 1871 which targeted gay men by making "unnatural vice between men" illegal. In 1907, Germany expanded the law to include lesbians. Inevitably, enforcement of Paragraph 175 ruined a lot of lives with jail sentences and public shunning. That's the substrate for the movie, Different From the Others. The movie opens with Paul Korner, a talented gay violinist & pianist reading about a string of "unexplained" suicides in the obituaries. Paul knows the obituaries are likely related to Paragraph 175. Korner meets and falls in love with one of his musical students. Their families are unhappy about the time they spend together. Korner's family meets his psychologist known as, Doctor, played by Dr. Magnus Hirshfield. The doctor explains that in clear terms that, "You must not condemn your son because he is a homosexual, he is not to blame for his orientation. It is not wrong, nor should it be a crime. Indeed, it is not even an illness, merely a variation, and one that is common to all of nature."

I bought the movie, now, I just have to buy a dvd player.

Assotto Saint, born Yves Francois Lubin in Les Cayes, Haiti in 1957. Assotto was an author, editor, dancer and musician in the band Xotika with his partner Jan Holmes. Assotto was named after a ceremonial drum used in Haitian voodoo rituals -- tambou assoto. He took the name “Saint” after the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Assotto edited The Road before us : 100 gay Black poets and encouraged Black gay men living with HIV to come out and disclose. Writing and publishing work became a means of living life and making sure the legacy of their artistic gay Black artistic community would not be forgotten. You can find his work and other gay Black anthologies like, In the Life, on Internet Archive.org. Sign up for an account and you can check the books out for an hour or 14 days.

KIYAN WILLIAMS: In one excerpt, Jesse is remarking on their life and some of the struggles that they experienced growing up in D.C., being estranged from their biological family. And in the same scene, we see someone in a park, who is behind Jesse, begin to verbally harass them. And the excerpt ends with Jesse getting up off of the bench and responding to and confronting their harasser. I remember distinctly Jesse standing up with their, like, long blue dress kind of trailing behind them and saying, you're not going to do a mother****ing thing to me. And if you come over here, we're going to beat your ass.

We honor Jesse Harris, in strength and vulnerability. Thank you for showing us ways to be ourselves. And we thank Kiyan Williams for tracing their story.

"What conservatives are very adept at, and very insightful about -- in ways that people at the center of America and on the left still don't quite get a handle on -- is how culture, not simply government and business and the law, is critical to control. Patterns of representation, ways of either including or excluding, silencing and erasing different communities and their stories, their narratives. Whether it's in the academy or on television or through the National Endowment for the Arts." - Marlon Riggs, 1992, Black Gay Filmmaker & Artist, interview in New York Times

In 1992, presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, thrust the 1989 film a Tongues Untied and the filmmaker Marlon Riggs into controversy. The film was a celebration of Black gay male life and the reality of the intersections of race, class and sexuality. It aired on PBS in 1991. One year later, Buchanan would accuse George W. Bush of using "tax payer money" to pay for pornographic movies. Riggs was outspoken and responded in a New York Times Op-Ed, “Because my film, ‘Tongues Untied,’ affirms the lives and dignity of [Black] gay men, conservatives have found it a convenient target,” he wrote, “despite the awards and popular and critical acclaim it received after its broadcast last summer on public television.”

Marlon understood the battle for recognition, existence, and expression was on-going. He worked tirelessly to produce films like Ethnic Notions, Color Adjustment, Black is Black Ain't, Anthem are available via the Criterion collection or Kanopy.com.

The Transformation was made by the same team as the groundbreaking documentary, The Salt Mines. After Sara learns of her mother's death and an HIV+ diagnosis, she's determined not to die on the streets alone. The Transformation chronicle's Sara's life once she accepts help from a coercive Christian Evangelical church. As a condition of helping Sara, Pastor Terry Weir and his church make Sara change her gender from female to a male (Ricardo) and her sexuality from queer to straight. Terry and his church begin teaching Sara, now going by Ricardo, how to "be a man". Ricardo moves to Dallas, Texas from New York, attending the church and marries Betty, but they weren't allowed to marry in the church. Terry Weir carried around an album of the "drag queens" he "saved". He was especially proud of "reforming" Ricardo. Terry used Ricardo as an example of God's ability to transform, fundraising and to recruit other transgender women into the church. The propaganda the church created lives on Youtube and on religious "gay conversion" pages. This clip of Sara/Ricardo saying that if she had her life to do all over again, she would choose to be a woman. It's clear that she was never "converted", but did the best she could to survive in a world with no social safety net. In this clip, she is clear:

"I repented for my past life and now when I think about everything I lived, I get very emotional. I remember some of it as beautiful because the real truth is that I enjoyed it. If I still had the choice, even if I could change my life right now – even now that I have my wife and everything – I would choose to be a woman." - Sara Read more about the Salt Mines and The Transformation in “To Hell with that Man Business!”: Gender Anxieties in The Salt Mines and The Transformation, Darren Arquero

Documentary Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin' Women. Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women is a compilation of rare jazz recordings, live performances, photographs, interviews, and narrative poetry by Cheryl Clarke. Tiny Davis and Ruby Lucas were jazz musicians who were partners for over 40 years until Tiny's death in 1994.

Tiny was a legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist. Ruby played piano, bass, and drums. They were members of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a 16-piece, multiracial, all-women band, filled with some of the most talented women musicians of the day.

At one point in Tiny and Ruby: Hell-Divin' Women, Tiny can be heard saying of the bond between her and her band members, “I could have played with Count Basie, Cab Calloway–the greatest. But I loved them gals too much. They were some sweet gals.” 

After the war, Tiny left the The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and they disbanded in 1949. Tiny formed her own band call. They opened Tiny and Ruby's Gay Spot in Chicago.

Tiny and Ruby's Gay Spot was demolished in 1958. You can read more about Tiny's legacy in Nina Cherry's article The Forgotten History Of A Leading Lesbian Jazz Trumpeter Driven From KC.

The full 28-minute documentary which appeared at film festivals in 1988 is on Kanopy (available through the public library and select college libraries). Unfortunately, this movie doesn't have closed captions.

If your library doesn't have a Kanopy subscriptions, you can watch The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: America's Hottest Girl Band documentary on youtube. The film was released in 1986 and contains interviews with past members and performances.